For some time, I’ve been trying to think about what lessons games have for teaching. At the always invigorating Ted Talks, Scott Kim makes me wonder if I should also be thinking about puzzles. Kim defines a puzzle as a problem that is fun to solve and has a right answer. Games, he argues, have no “right answer.”
In teaching, we are often trying to get students to come to a “right answer.” (Indeed, students come to expect that there is always a right answer, somewhere in the back of the book somewhere. One of the hardest things to convey to students is how often the answer to a question is, “I don’t know, and I don’t think anybody does know.”) To help students remember the “right answer,” we give students problems.
Problems are easy to make; puzzles are hard to make. The problem keeps coming back to, “How do you make it fun?” Some people play games to entertain themselves, but others play to challenge themselves.
3 comments:
It's an interesting idea. Students who enjoy puzzle solving could maybe benefit if they were taught techniques to look at real world problems as puzzles.
I really like this distinction. Like you (okay, reading into a little here, but not that much!), I'm often frustrated by students' inability to realise that there is no such thing as "the right answer". Nice.
An interesting & informative post!
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